* Survey respondents rate their problems in managing messaging systems
If you’re in charge of providing messaging services for a Fortune 500 company, you have a tough job juggling growing storage requirements, compliance issues, regulations, spam, spyware and lots of other vexing issues that threaten your messaging systems every day. However, if you’re in charge of messaging for a much smaller company, you probably face worse problems.
In a recent survey we conducted, we asked decision-makers to rate the problems they face in managing their messaging systems. In David Letterman style, here are the top-10 problems we found:
10. Users working at home creating security problems.
9. E-mail fraud other than phishing.
8. Employees sending/receiving inappropriate content.
7. Phishing attacks.
6. Security/privacy/confidentiality of messages sent by users.
5. Viruses/worms/Trojans impacting our network, systems, etc.
4. Supporting traveling/field/remote users.
3. Inadequate e-mail archiving.
2. The amount of spam received.
1. Growth in e-mail storage requirements.
However, when we divided the survey audience into organizations with up to 2,500 employees and those with more than 2,500 employees, we found that for nine out of the 10 problems listed above, smaller organizations rated their problems as worse than did larger organizations. In some cases, the difference was substantial: for example, while 59% of larger organizations consider growth in e-mail storage requirements to be a serious or very serious problem, 76% of smaller organizations feel this way.
Why the difference? I believe that the key problem for smaller organizations is that their cost of messaging management is higher on a per user basis. This is because labor represents a larger share of the cost of messaging management for smaller organizations, and smaller organizations simply pay more for software, hardware and other messaging systems because they buy in smaller volumes.
For example, a 10,000-user company might be able to afford one full-time IT staff member at $70,000 per year to solve a specific problem; if a 1,000-user company dedicated one-half as much labor to the same problem, their labor cost to solve this problem would be five times higher on a per-user basis. The bottom line is that smaller organizations just can’t afford to devote more resources to solve problems, hence, their problems are more serious.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this issue – please drop me a line at mailto:michael@ostermanresearch.com
